Keith Love ’13 in NPR Story about Top Medical School Luring Humanities Majors

While most students at Mount Sinai’s school of medicine in NYC were traditional premed undergraduates, a growing number came through Mount Sinai’s Humanities in Medicine program, known as HuMed. These students—including Keith Love ’13, an environmental science major and anthropology minor at Colby—majored in humanities-related subjects at a handful of top liberal arts schools, and Mount Sinai teaches them the necessary science during summers. According to Mount Sinai’s dean for medical education, Dr. David Muller, program founder Dr. Nathan Kase “had a firm belief that you couldn’t be a good doctor and a well-rounded doctor—relate to patients and communicate with them—unless you really had a good grounding in the liberal arts.”

Love, a first-year HuMed student, said he originally gave himself a “zero percent chance” of going to medical school, but “I thought about what I really wanted to get out of a career—and it was medicine.”

Medical students like Love add diversity to classrooms that would otherwise be filled with science wonks. Muller noted, “People who look at the same problems through different lenses will make us better in the long run.”

The program has been so successful that Mount Sinai is expanding it, opening it to students in any major from any college or university. The updated program will have a new name, FlexMed.